Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Designing Mike Worth’s website gave me a chance to blend expressive design with modern development techniques, and revisiting image maps reminded me just how important a tool image maps were during the period Mike loves so much.”

Designing for Mike Worth’s new website reminded me how much I love classic cartoons. So, after handing over his design, I carried on exploring CSS, SVG, and SMIL animations. I now have a growing collection of Toon Titles.

I now have a growing collection of Toon Titles. But while making them, I discovered two gotchas, which I haven’t seen documented. One for Firefox, the other for Safari.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “I’ve used border-image regularly. Yet, it remains one of the most underused CSS tools, and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. Is it possible that people steer clear of border-image because its syntax is awkward and unintuitive? Perhaps it’s because most explanations don’t solve the type of creative implementation problems that most people need to solve. Most likely, it’s both.”

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Honestly, it’s difficult for me to come to terms with, but almost 20 years have passed since I wrote my first book, Transcending CSS. In it, I explained how and why to use what was the then-emerging Multi-Column Layout module. Yet, CSS Columns remains one of the most underused CSS layout tools. I wonder why that is?”

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is out and I’m seeing it this coming Saturday. I’m so excited that I decided to update one of my responsive easter egg headers—Kerfuffle on the Planet of the Apes—with more efficient, modern code. In this final post of the short series, I’ll explain how I added animations and subtle transitions to bring the design to life.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is out, and I’m so excited that I decided to update one of my responsive easter egg headers—Kerfuffle on the Planet of the Apes—with more efficient, modern code. Today, I’ll explain how I made the layout using a combination of container queries, Flexbox, and grid.

I don’t look at my analytics often, but after last week’s site revamp, I thought I’d check to see which pages were popular. Oddly, a post in my ancient archives about CSS specificity had been getting a fair few Google referrals, so I decided to spend a few hours updating that, too.

This week, I launched Design Chatter. It’s a weekly one-hour Zoom call where like-minded designers can give each other constructive, friendly feedback.

One of my favourite CSS writers Ahmad Shadeed has written about CSS Masking and I thought I could put his techniques to good use on Emma’s website.

Emma Bodger is a film/television producer, and recently, I’ve spent time working on her visual identity and a new website. It’s been a lot of fun, and I also learned more about SVG while working on it. I’m digging into the details this week, and today I’ll reveal the Easter Egg theme which I hid on Emma’s website.

Emma Bodger is a film/television producer, and recently, I’ve spent time working on her visual identity and a new website. It’s been a lot of fun, and I also learned more about SVG while working on it. I’m digging into the details this week, and today I’ll explain how I made experimental banner images for Emma’s home page using SVG masks.

Emma Bodger is a film/television producer, and recently, I’ve spent time working on her visual identity and a new website. It’s been a lot of fun, and I also learned more about SVG while working on it. I’m digging into the details this week, and today I’ll explain how I made an experimental word search concept for Emma’s home page.

Emma Bodger is a film/television producer, and recently, I’ve spent time working on her visual identity and a new website. It’s been a lot of fun, and I also learned a few things while working on it. I’m digging into the details this week, and today I’ll explain the pseudo-3D design I created for Emma’s home page banner.

Emma Bodger is a film/television producer, and recently, I’ve spent time working on her visual identity and a new website. It’s been a lot of fun, and I also learned more about SVG while working on it. I’m digging into the details this week, and today I’ll explain the SVG filters I created to transform images on Emma’s website.

In a video of one his talks, Andy Bell mentioned CUBE CSS and his approach to using data attributes for variations (exceptions) to design styles. I’m currently working on a grid system for a product project and revamping my Layout Love templates, so was keen to implement this approach.

After writing yesterday’s blog entry on Re-coding Apple’s Black Friday dates I realised I had missed the bleedin’ obvious solution. That instead of wrangling CSS and HTML, SVG could’ve been the better option.

Most parts of Apple’s website are fabulously flexible. But today, I was browsing for Black Friday deals and found a fixed-width design element which I was determined to make flexible.

Here’s a quick design tip for making headlines more interesting using text-decoration.

Here’s a quick design tip for improving the readability and style of long passages of running text.

Safari Technology Preview is my every day browser. When the latest version dropped, a feature in the release notes interested me. It was experimental support for three new relative colour CSS values. So, I tried what’s possible now.

There’s been a meta tag for specifying a theme-color for UI elements on websites for a while. If you’ve used it, now’s time to change that element along with the upcoming version of Safari.

I’m not a framework user. I’ve never once used Bootstrap and I didn’t use 960gs or Blueprint before that. I can understand the benefits of using a framework or off-the-shelf templates, but they weren’t ever for me. Still, I wanted a simple set of layout modules I could call on for design projects, so I developed my own. I call them Layout Love.

Let’s face it, unless you develop a complex product—and even if you do—you probably don’t need half the humungous hunk of CSS you bung at a browser. In fact, it’s possible you only need one default and one alternative style for every element.